


Midnight Sun

by SixEyedSoul



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Episode Tag, Funeral Preparations, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:15:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27040078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SixEyedSoul/pseuds/SixEyedSoul
Summary: A missing scene following Commander Erwin Smith’s death.
Relationships: Levi & Erwin Smith, Levi/Erwin Smith
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	Midnight Sun

Levi has shouldered the weight of much throughout his life. For ten years, he has carried the ghosts of Furlan and Isabel, though their ghosts are immensely kind. The only weight he feels for them is the weight of their hands on his shoulders. The weight of Mike, of Nanaba, of Petra, of the dozens of friends he has lost... they are heavier. They sit atop his spine and press him into the earth. 

Additionally, he has shouldered cargo. Knapsacks and rucksacks and all manner of baggage for himself. His ODM gear weighs roughly thirty kilos when it is fully fueled. He wears the straps even when it is not equipped. They are a form of security he can rarely be without anymore. 

Now, he carried the future of children in his hands. Children, whom he has had to entrust humanity to. One child especially, the blond boy whom Erwin saw so much potential in. Later, he will have to carry that boy. 

For now, he carries the heaviest weight of his life. 

Levi is strong, both physically and mentally. He has endured everything in his life so far without falling to pieces. He has always kept moving. Now, he wishes that the weight in his hands would push him down into hell. He knows he could never join Erwin in heaven. 

Hange is at the head of their makeshift stretcher, and Levi watches their hair move with each laborious step, unable to look down yet. Hange will one day join Erwin in heaven, Levi knows. Each of them deserve that peace that everyone seems to believe comes with the place. He does not. He only deserves this: the sting of the unprocessed wooden supports digging into his hands, the sound of Hange’s restrained breathing, the sound of his own heartbeat in his ear. Still beating, though the rhythm is somehow halved.

When they reach the top of the stairs, Hange guides the stretcher to the bed in the corner without comment and helps Levi set its precious cargo gently among the sheets. They look at Levi, and he turns away. The gentleness, the understanding in their undamaged eye is too much for him to bear. They must think he doesn't deserve this, but they don't know that this is all he has ever known. Loss. Emptiness. 

Hange leaves, closing the door behind themselves. Levi finally looks down.

The high color that usually adorns Erwin’s cheeks has been replaced by the pallor of death. His eyes have been closed, but Levi can still somehow see how dull the brilliant blue has become. He thinks he will see it every moment of the rest of his life. The crisp white of Erwin’s uniform has been soiled with the blood of the earth as well as his own. Levi stares down at the man, unseeing and unfeeling, until there is a gentle knock on the door and Hange reappears. They don't even look at Levi, simply set a bucket of water and a bundle of cloth on the floor before leaving as quietly as they came.

There are a collection of clean washcloths, as well as Erwin’s spare set of clothes. Levi holds the white shirt in his hand for a moment, inspecting the careful hemming of the right sleeve, identical to the hemming on the shirt Erwin already wears. The stitches have held, and Levi is grateful for this tiniest of mercies. Part of him thinks that something that small could cleave him in two at this point. 

If this were anyone else, Levi thinks, he would be the one to tell his soldiers that there was no time to honor the dead, that they had to keep moving. Now, no one comes to tell him that it's time to move. He thinks they would let him stay in this room forever, if he wanted to. He does. He knows he can't. He begins his horrible work.

First, he removes the filthy clothes from Erwin, discarding them in a pile in the corner of the room. His eyes are drawn to the still ragged scar tissue at Erwin’s right shoulder before they’re drawn to the new, gaping wound at his commander's waist. How had Erwin survived long enough to be brought to him? Was it to torture him? He certainly couldn't put it past the man. 

He cleans the wound gently, sweeping the cloths over the skin until the blood is blessedly absent and it's just the jagged, unbleeding wound to remind Levi that he is not treating a wound. He is preparing a body. He continues, cleaning the dirt and filth from his commander. He is gentle around Erwin’s face, using the gentlest brushes of trembling fingers to coax out the last hints of life that remain on Erwin’s cooling skin. The five o’clock shadow that had just begun to develop. The gentle curve of his lips, turned down into a frown that Levi cannot smooth away despite his ministrations. The strong set of his brow, settled over those eyes that will never open again. His hands have been shaking since the rooftop. Since he had had to choose whether to sentence himself to a life without Erwin or sentence Erwin to more of this same horrible life. 

When he had first seen Erwin, the man had given him his first taste of the wings of freedom. Now, he hoped, Erwin might finally have the real thing. 

It was a vain hope. A vain hope of a desperate man. Levi was not a religious man, but he would become one if only to hope that Erwin had finally received a reward for all this.

He even cleans Erwin’s hair, though he isn't satisfied with how little he can do without soaking the bedsheets and the pillow he has settled under Erwin’s head. 

When he knows he should be satisfied, because he doubts he'll ever be satisfied again in this life, he begins to redress the man. He has bandaged the side, though he knows it makes little difference, to stop it from staining the new shirt he manages to slip onto Erwin’s ungainly form. He has to sit the man up and use himself as a prop as he works the remaining arm into the sleeve. He tries not to focus on how cold Erwin’s cheek has grown against his neck, how there is no warm, laughing breaths to send goose flesh breaking out across his skin. When he has settled arm and stump into their sleeves he buttons the shirt and tucks the tails into Erwin’s pants, smoothing the wrinkles though Erwin never cared to himself.

The bolo tie is settled back at the curve of Erwin’s collarbone, and Levi sets to polishing the boots. There is only water and none of the products he usually has, and he feels it is unsatisfactory when he carefully slips the boots, clean but scuffed to hell, back onto Erwin’s feet. As if he has failed in his duties, though Erwin had never told him to shine his boots in life. It was simply something that he did. Shine his boots. Bring him coffee. Remind him to rest. Bring him food. Iron his shirts before important meetings. Watch his back, he will watch yours. Trust him. Dedicate your heart.

He has dedicated his heart, he thinks. Perhaps too much. More than he should have ever been allowed to. 

He carefully removes the makeshift stretcher from the bed, smooths and brushes off the sheets around Erwin and sits. His head falls to his hands, though he doesn’t cry. He doesn't cry because he simply has never allowed himself to. When he sat with his mother for days and her body slowly grew more rancid, he didn't cry. When he nearly kicked the decapitated head of one of the dearest friends he'd ever know, he didn't cry. When he watched his dear friend, his comrades, people he had never met be eaten by Titans, he didn't cry. Now, he didn't cry, but a scream began to well up in his throat. He thought of allowing himself this simple agony, but he knew that if he let himself scream, he would have no choice than to drown in his tears.

After a long while, when the sun had begun to fall and fill the room with a soft orange light, Levi finally stood. He looked down. The evening light cast Erwin is shades of gold. He could have been alive, if the sun had given him air and blood in addition to color. His hair shone bright and the high color had returned to his cheeks. Levi knelt beside the bed, letting his hand fall to the pillow beside Erwin’s cheek. The man’s soft hair brushed against his fingers as they trembled. 

“In another life.” The statement was simple, delivered in a voice made even more gruff by the emotion welling to choke the speaker. It was plea, promise, and declaration all in one. A farewell and a promise to meet again. Because if Levi had to fight his way out of hell and rip his way into heaven, he would be with Erwin again. He would follow him, and never regret that decision. 

When he finally stood to leave, he stopped again and plucked the clean wings of freedom Hange had left from the floor. He turned back to Erwin, the man who had pulled him from the underground and rode beside him for ten years now, and draped the green fabric gently across the man. 

“Rest now, my friend.”

The door closed softly, and the sun leached slowly from the room.


End file.
